


Good as Gold

by historymiss



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-13 18:09:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21198377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: ‘This is her body, moving down the aisles of skeletons and faithful like a little clockwork doll, dragging her parents behind her as if on a string. This is her blood, layer upon skeletonised layer, and her father’s blood, too, and her mother’s, her grandmother’s, an unending chain of kneeling black figures.’A young Harrow character study.





	Good as Gold

She wakes in darkness: she always does. The skeletons can’t come in here to clean or set the lamps. Slowly, Harrow gets out of her narrow bed and kneels on the floor beside it until the Primary Bell rings. She presses her forehead to the cold stone of the cell, feels the core of Drearburh shift and groan as it awakens. Her breathing is deep, and even, like a sleepwalker.

Carefully, she drags a stool over to the mirror that hangs above her mother’s old dresser. She applies paint, stroke by painstaking stroke, appraises herself critically in the mirror, then wipes it off and starts again. Harrow does this four times. Eventually, there is no more time left to correct it. She climbs down from the stool and dresses in those clothes she has that do not button up the back. 

She does not look at the great, curtained bed in the centre of the family cell. Does not allow herself to think about what waits there, in the shadows, in the dark. 

Still. As her hand reaches up to open the door, the mouldering bed hangings stir.

Harrow’s hand hesitates, forms a fist. 

Her breathing becomes more deliberately regular.

Priamhark and Pelleamena join their daughter.

——

Harrow kneels at the altar, praying for the perpetual sanctity of a tomb she defiled. She speaks clearly, and with feeling, and when she pricks the base of her thumb to let four fat red drops of blood well up on the skin, she does it with the detached precision of a doctor. Smearing it onto the carved stone, Harrow feels a sudden out-of-body vertigo. 

This is her body, moving down the aisles of skeletons and faithful like a little clockwork doll, dragging her parents behind her as if on a string. This is her blood, layer upon skeletonised layer, and her father’s blood, too, and her mother’s, her grandmother’s, an unending chain of kneeling black figures. 

Harrow looks up, and up, and up, and imagines what it would be like to fall into that endless, dreary sky.

——

Sometimes she feels as if she cannot breathe, as if the seals on the atmo locks have failed and all air has escaped, and Drearburh has become the great rock tomb it was always meant to be.

At night, it’s worse. Her bed is a bier, the darkness a shroud pressing on her mouth and eyes and consuming her utterly. 

Forgetting herself, Harrow gets up. Pads across the room in her bare feet.

Before she allows herself to think, she parts the curtains. Her parents lie there, eyes open, empty, still. 

Harrow climbs onto the bed. Lies down between them, careful not to touch anywhere below their necks. 

With a sigh, like air escaping from a sealed room, her mother’s hand moves to come to rest on her hair.


End file.
